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Engineering a Cooler Planet

By Eric Etheridge October 21, 2009 1:40 pmOctober 21, 2009 1:40 pm

Four years ago, Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner wrote a bestseller called “Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything” (which begat a popular blog, now at the Times). The sequel, “Superfreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes, and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance,” was officially published yesterday but has been heatedly debated for over a week in opinionland, primarily the “global cooling” bit.

That ongoing ruckus is not our topic today. Rather, it’s the robust discussion the controversy has kicked up on the new-fangled environmental strategy known as geoengineering.

What’s that?
Calling it a MacGyver-ish solution to global warming would probably be too flip, so let’s go to Nate Silver for more proper basics. Geoengineering “is intentionally altering the Earth’s climate system, presumably with the goal of balancing out the effects of global warming.”

Arguably the two most promising geoengineering approaches are:

— Finding some mechanism to shoot sulfur into the atmosphere — this is the approach that Levitt and Dubner concentrate on in SuperFreakonomics. Sulfur has a cooling effect, as can be observed, for instance, when there is a large volcanic eruption — volcanoes emit lots of sulfur and when Mount Pinatubo erupted in 1991 it cooled the planet’s temperatures by approximately 0.9° F for several months.

— Creating artificial cloudcover. Or to be more precise, modifying clouds to be more reflective, which would modify the earth’s albedo and cause more sunlight to be bounced back into space.

One is carbon capture and sequestration, which I’ll call “air capture.” This is the “Building a Better Tree” style geoengineering. We grab carbon out of the air through some technology — bioengineered plankton blooms with iron sprinkles in the oceans, special tower vents, etc. We take that carbon and store it somewhere — underground, at the bottom of the ocean, etc. This will actually reduce carbon out of the air, and as long as we store it correctly (a big if!) it will reduce carbon in the atmosphere, fighting global warming. . . .

“Air capture” is not what most people, especially economists that you are likely to read, are talking about. A typical report . . . will say something like: “air capture technologies do not appear as promising as solar radiation management from a technical or a cost perspective.” So what’s solar radiation management? This is the plan to inject sulfate aerosol precursors into the stratosphere at the North and South poles using tech like jet fighters, balloons, a hose if we can design it to deliever it. . . . This will block out the sun, in effect engineering a massive volcanic eruption, which would cool the Earth. So that’s a plus.

That’s the science part. For the political part, let’s go to Joe Weisenthal at Business Insider. He says that geoengineering is something “global warming activists hate.” To understand why that is, “first you have to realize why global warming is the perfect global malady from the perspective of the left.”

You see, global warming is a special problem, and it sits right at the sweet spot of all kinds of politically charged issues. By going after global warming, you’re also going after

The oil industry

Cars

Western nations

Rural areas

Industrialization

The meat industry

Huge suburban homes

All those things happen to be politically charged, as it is, and the left has long had them (to varying degress) in their sights.

Now there’s something else, too. Global warming, it seems, MUST, involve a government solution — and preferrably an international solution. No single country can solve the issue by itself, and no private party has any incentive to reduce emissions significantly (except, inasmuch as doing so helps their image, though this is marginal). The solution must be public sector, it would seem, so again, for those with an orthodox liberal worldview, this is a good thing.

And from that, you should understand why it’s so enraging to people that some might suggest a technological solution is possible. If we can suck out carbon from the atmosphere, then the oil industry, cars, and huge homes in the middle of nowhere aren’t such a problem. And if there’s a technological solution, then there’s no need for expanded government regulation, or multi-national UN charters, and all that good stuff.

Not in actual but virtual response, Mike Konczai has a hard time imagining any kind of grand geo-solution that doesn’t involve the government, the U.N. and “all that good stuff.”

Having spent a fair amount of brainpower and energy over the past month trying to convince right-leaning folks and libertarians that having three bureaucrats sit down and come up with a default “vanilla option” checking account won’t be a first step on the road to serfdom, I’m somewhat confused by the wave of excitement among right-leaning folks and libertarians for having three bureaucrats sit down and come up with the optimal level of sulfur to be pumped into the stratosphere at the north and south poles.

At Think Progress, Matt Yglesias wonders why we don’t prefer a readily available “market-mechanism” — pricing CO2 emmissions — to guide our efforts to find the best mix of solutions to global warming, instead of a more “Five Year Plan” kind of solution geogengineering represents.

I don’t think it makes sense for political pundits to spend a lot of time debating the relative difficulty of developing different hypothetical future technologies. Instead, I would just say that the best way to find out whether human ingenuity is better at keeping atmospheric CO2 concentrations at a sustainable level by developing artificial trees or by developing better windmills is to . . . implement a binding emissions reduction scheme that puts a price on CO2 emissions. . . .

What I think is remarkable is the extent to which people on the right, in their zeal to avoid a market mechanism that the business establishment happens to hate, have a tendency to talk up what instead amounts to a kind of Five Year Plan approach. Instead of regulating carbon, let’s just direct scientists of invent miracle trees! Let’s turn the sky red! The greenhouse gas problem is one of the largest political crises the liberal/democratic/capitalist order has ever faced, but unlike something like Hitler the basic shape of the problem is something we’ve seen and dealt with before. The whole “sometimes there are negative externalities and you need to charge people for them” thing is in basic textbooks. Maybe the result of such a scheme will be a technological miracle, or maybe not but the shape of the policy environment that will let us find out isn’t mysterious.

Ryan Avent says the appeal of a grand technological fix is a grass-is-greener kind of thing. “One of the things about politics is that solutions always seem easier to implement and more promising before they stand a real chance of being implemented.”

[T]he question that stands out most to me is just why these geoengineering advocates think that it will be easier to do grand scale, highly unpredictable projects that will affect the earth’s climate in a significant fashion in just a short amount of time than it will be to continue on the path we’re currently following, negotiating for emission cuts. Really, have they thought about this?

Begin with the fact that politicians are extremely risk averse. Who wants to be the guy in charge of the effort to build the who-knows-how-many-billions-of-dollars 18-mile long sulphur dioxide tube? The downside risks are enormous relative to the potential upside benefits. . . .

Geoengineering seems like the easy approach now, because it’s not on the table. There is no hysterical battle between proponents and opponents, no op-ed bickering between scientists and faux scientists, no global debate on who would and should bear which costs associated with whatever solution is agreed upon. But as soon as it became a real possibility, a fierce debate would rage. And, if one major geoengineering solution were tried and it failed, it is difficult to see how another attempt could win support, and at that point, of course, we’d have lost the ability to address climate change by reducing emissions when it would have helped.

I think it would be irresponsible not to continue studying the issue and looking for potential geoeingineering fixes, but I think that anyone suggesting that we should abandon the effort to cut emissions in favor of a geoengineering approach has not thought the matter through. It should be considered the last ditch effort, only pursued seriously when it is clear that emission cuts will not prevent catastrophic warming.

Will Wilkinson wants to argue with Avent over consigning geoengineering to the “last ditch” slot. “I’ve thought the matter through, but I still don’t understand this ordering of priorities.”

I understand the strategic political motivation to make all potential technological fixes to global warming seem like wacky, hare-brained, mad-scientist schemes to block the sun, but the more I think that through, the less it looks like responsible politics.

Just suppose that some form of climate engineering could (1) do as much or more to slow or halt warming than could regulatory approaches (2) at a much lower cost while (3) posing no special problem of international coordination. Perhaps Avent has already made the case that some technology (or combination of technologies) meeting this description is less likely to emerge in the coming decades than an effective scheme of international carbon emission controls. If he has, I’ve missed it. However, if the success of a primarily technological approach is no less probable than the success of a primarily global political-regulatory approach, it would be egregiously irresponsible to discourage public support of efforts to discover such technology. If the probabilities turn out to favor engineering over politics, then emissions cuts, not engineering, should be considered last ditch.

Avent goes on to work through the potential difficulties of one particular geo-idea — super-carbon-eating trees — that Wilkinson mentions as a possibility. We’d need a tremendous number of them, says Avent, leading to fights over land-use and incentive mechanisms; eventually we’d overwhelm even these super trees with our carbon; and besides, the tree-approach might fail.

In other words, geoengineering deployment will share many of the problems involved in obtaining agreements to reduce emissions, will probably not work well unless we’re also reducing emissions, and may fail, in which case we’d really, really like to have been cutting emissions to avoid disaster. There’s really no scenario in which it isn’t a good idea to go ahead and try to cut emissions while investigating the opportunities for geoengineering.

Nate Silver lays out similar concerns, informed in part by his conversation with “Dr. John Latham, a seventysomething British scientist employed by the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado,” who is working on artificial cloud cover schemes.

Certain computer simulations that Latham and his team ran identified, for instance, a reduction in rainfall in South America as a result of one of his suggested implementation proposals. A different implementation scheme might avoid that particular problem, but could cause problems in other areas. . . .

That doesn’t mean that geoengineering would be “bad”, relative to the scenario of runaway warming. It could potentially be a lot, lot better, on balance, for most of the planet. But “on balance” skirts over the regional discrepancies. How would Brazil feel, for instance, if the most optimal scheme happened to reduce its crop yields by 20 percent? How would Bangladesh feel if the approaches increased precipitation in the Himalayas, which in turn increased the flooding in its river deltas? What if we were trying pick between two approaches, one of which might increase the habitability of the Australian Outback, but others of which might make it even less hospitable to human settlement? And just who has the right to shoot a few volcano’s worth of sulfur up into the atmosphere, anyway?

Back to Konczai, who says there’s a moral hazard if governments go geo, and poses a thought experiment to make his case:

Thought exercise: the carbon could be at a point where global temperatures would rise 5 degrees, but we’ve engineered the stratosphere to be 5 degrees cooler by putting sulfur in the stratosphere. So we are net neutral temperature. Things that are related to carbon in the atmosphere that aren’t temperature related, like ocean acidification, would continue to go crazy.

But now let’s then assume that the sulfur is causing too many side effects, and we want to shut it down. Then what happens? The sulfur rains out over the course of a short time period, say a year, and then the Earth heats up 5 degrees very, very quickly. No gradual increase over this time period; we have the same carbon amount as we had before. We haven’t lost any weight, we were just wearing bigger pants. That would be a nightmare situation, and as such even if the side-effects were terrible it would be difficult to “turn off” such a plan.

So given that there’s a moral hazard to the problem — once government agents commit to doing it, we alter any subsequent decision by private agents to invest in carbon removing technologies — and there’s a series path dependency with turning it on — once we start doing this it is incredibly dangerous to stop doing this — I wouldn’t treat the decision for the government to add this to our intellectual and global warming portfolio of options as trivial.

Everyone just stop and read Vonnegut’s ‘Cat’s Cradle”. We do not want the world to end with ‘ice-nine.”
My Geology professor at U of Penn, the phenomenal Geigengack, used to use tell tales of the Army Corps of Engineers projects that backfired – too many to enumerate..
The stories (unexpected siltation at the Hoover dam, the Salton Sea, the Levees in New Orleans for that matter) always were good for a huge laugh.
Please. Can’t we all just cut back..Walk. no meat..Drive 55 mph if you have to drive (when is THAT law going to be reinstated?)..there are so many simple solutions..

Even if a workable “solar radiation management” technology were developed, it wouldn’t deal with ocean acidification, a problem that is already manifesting itself. It may be worth studying various forms of geo-engineering, but at present, this kind of technological fix is nothing but a pipe-dream.

It’s incredibly irresponsible to propose geoengineering as an alternative to cutting emissions. Basically what they’re saying is that instead of fixing the problem itself, we should try a massive, unprecedented experiment with the entire planet in the test tube and only one shot to get it right.

Best case scenario, we get it right and then we’re addicted to continuing the geoengineering project or we’ll suffer catastrophic warming. Any unforseen halt in the process (wars or economic problems for example) would cause catastrophe, and we would have to continue for hundreds, even thousands of years or at least until we think of something better.

Medium case scenario, we get it wrong and the cure causes more problems than the disease, and then we’re stuck with the choice of turning it off and risking catastrophic warming, or leaving it on and suffering whatever adverse consequences it causes.

Worst case scenario, the proposed solution triggers catastrophic, irreversable feedback loops and we end up in an ice age or something equally bad with no good options to fix it. Game over.

A rational being would only take such a risk as a last resort, having completely exhausted all other options and faced with certain catastrophe.

1) We’ve done a lot of inadvertant meddling with the climate, so maybe we should try some advertant steps? I especially favor white roofs to reflect sunlight.

2) Someone (Steven Chu?) compared climate change to a cliff somewhere in the fog. We’re driving toward it — but we don’t know where the real drop-off is. Wouldn’t it be smart for us to start to slow down?

Joe Wiesenthal says: “If we can suck out carbon from the atmosphere, then the oil industry, cars, and huge homes in the middle of nowhere aren’t such a problem.”

Yes, they are, Joe. Here’s why:

1) Carbon emissions are acidifying the oceans, a grave problem in its own right.

2) Perpetuating oil dependence means perpetuating the transfer of American dollars to creepy petro-regimes and the bomb-throwers that they bankroll.

3) Huge homes in the middle of nowhere induce congestion and sprawl, which paves over farmland, working forests, and wildlife habitat, and sends slugs of polluted stormwater into rivers, lakes, and coastal waters.

We may have to turn to geo-engineering, despite the fears of resistant greens and the starry-eyed embrace of hubristic right-wingers. But we better make damned sure that no one jumps the gun and starts shooting at the clouds before we really know what the hell we’re doing. Right now, we don’t.

Correct me if I’m wrong here, but didn’t we spend the ‘90s getting sulfur dioxide OUT of the atmosphere (to keep our lakes from dying and our buildings from melting from acid rain)? Sure, p.190 of SuperFreakonomics claims that in the stratosphere sulfur dioxide can stay up for a year or more, but doesn’t it still have to come down at some point?

it’s not about the climate. no “solution” that doesn’t involve a huge proposed transference from rich to poor countries will be acceptable to the climate activists.

it is ironic that the entire co2—>global warming conceit was first concocted by margaret thatcher, the conservative iron maiden british prime minister in the 80s, who desparately (and successfully) used agw to crush the powerful coal miners union by declaring the necessity to move to co2-clean nuclear power.

when the berlin wall fell in 1989 and the communists were in danger of being forever defanged, they quickly glommed onto (and took over) the environmental movement, and most brilliantly converted the co2—> ‘menace to to the planet’ to their own needs and ends.

this treaty is nothing more than the culmination of their 20-year brew to a) kneecap the u.s. (which is getting easier and easier all the time due to our pusillanimous politicians and the voters who elect them); b) impose world socialism on the planet; and c) to frame and enforce the transfer of every last drop of wealth from the advanced industrial countries to the third world.

i’ll be glad to see this treaty go down to defeat. but to fully understand the politics and funding behind the agw climate activists it’s helpful to read about the interlocking relationship between the huge washington left-wing pr mill FENTON COMMUNICATIONS and their climate activist blog organ REALCLIMATE, whose lifeblood depends on the credibility of the hockey stick (mann & schmidt of Realclimate.

that steve mcintyre, a respected scientist and former ipcc reviewer, was able recently to so successfully challenge the methodology behind the ‘hockey stick’ (see nyt/andrew revkin dot earth blog) explains why he and other skeptics present such a grave threat to the agw activists.

it’s not (and never was) about the climate. it’s about the $$$. and who should pay whom for their past “sins.”

That would be the ruckus that Levitt and Dubner created when they tried to get traction out of the discredited global cooling meme that is still a rallying point for Inhofe-style global warming deniers.

Oh, so we’re not supposed to discuss that Levitt and Dubner have been discredited about knowing what they are talking about before they even get out of the gate.

it is no accident that poster #5 thom refers to a website named “LEFT as an exercise” as the warehouse for retorts to the dubner/lefitt proposed solution.

otherwise, i certainly don’t claim to have any special knowledge as to whether their proposed geo-engineering solution is viable or even necessary for a “problem” which has always been a strawman for imposing leftist ideology on the entire planet.

“if you control carbon, you control life.”
richard lindzen, m.i.t. professor of atmospheric sciences.

Um. Geoengineering is a vastly expensive procedure requiring an agreement of all world governments and large, unknown increases in spending. It will have to be accomplished by a central world authority and its outcomes are – to say the least – uncertain.

On the other hand a simple carbon tax operates by stimulating individual initiative and ingenuity. It calls into action the resources of the entire population who proceed to make small changes in their lifestyles and, possibly, to invent new technologies that have not yet been dreamed of.

Because it changes individual incentives the carbon tax will almost certainly work.

And the Chicago School guys go for – the massive, risky, centralized and intrusive program that depends on the wisdom of a small number of technocrats and self-interested bureaucrats.

Does anybody else see this as a massive contradiction of Chicago’s philosophy of market based, decentralized policy?

While the geoengineers are busy coming up with schemes that may or may not work down the line, how about taking the more prudent course and cutting emissions, here and now. I, for one, will be participating in the International Day of Climate Action on Saturday, sponsored by 350.org. As of last count, there will be 4229 events in 171 countries, including Iraq, Israel, Congo and Swasiland.

I don’t believe the notion of a technological solution is entirely bad, but it strikes me as tragic that there is more written on the “controversy” of whether or not we can persist as we have, largely unfettered by the problem of climate change, but little written on what actual reduction would look like.

Meanwhile over 4000 climate actions are identifying the target parts per million where the earth is at a safe level and broadcasting it to the delegates that would represent us at the climate meetings in Copenhagen.

I couldn’t read past the first paragraph… As an engineering professor, I am shocked –no, make that depressed– at the unembarrassed reporting on the perceived miracles of unsustainable logic. Overconsume, use magical technology (dreamed up by economists) to erase the consequences, overconsume more, erase more, and so on. Isn’t there a Nobel prize for that?

If reducing or eliminating the risk associated with excessive warming and associated desertification, flooding, lose of polar bears, economic chaos, displacement of populations etc. is the true goal, then why only focus on anthropogenic CO2 reduction? Certainly CO2 is a greenhouse gas and it is causing some global warming based on reasonable hypothesis, but how much?
The intellectually honest position is that everything we are told about climate science, none of which has been subject to rigorous tests, suggests that CO2 plays a role and is causing some of the warming but not all of it. The best qualitative science we have is greenhouse effects; however, there are other cloud, ocean current effects, solar radiation, geological movement, etc in play here. How we do know this? We know this because the proxy record of 540 million years says it will get much warmer and in the not too distant future we will need to control the temperature EVEN IF WE STOP INPUTTING ANTHROPOGENIC CO2 TOMORROW.
So what are the options? What is the best way we can ensure survival as the climate inexorably moves towards it historic maximum temperature. The answer is techniques wrapped up in a package called geo engineering. It should be taken very seriously. It is the only option that will protect the planet and save us when the temperature begins to soar. I suggest reading Foreign Affairs April 2009 for a fair and balanced exploration of geo engineering.

Putting 9-10 billion people on the planet is an experiment we haven’t tried yet either. To suppose that we can have 10 billion people and not change the climate is simply foolish. There will be high carbon levels, even with the best of intentions and political will globally, a state is not in any way apparent yet. So we should get our act together and start examining which approaches can best deal with high carbon levels. The attitude where we’re going to somehow return the earth to its 1900 state, in carbon emissions or in any other way, is hardly a productive approach to solve our problems. An earth with 10 billion people won’t look like an earth with 1 billion people. There. It’s been said. Now let’s take a deep breath and learn to deal with it. Of course we should be looking seriously at geo-engineering. We may need every trick in the book before we’re through.

While we weren’t looking, someone must have implemented one or more of the geoengineering ideas. The planet has been cooling for the last few years and is expected to be cooling for the next two decades.

I envisage a scenario where if the US can block the sun in a certain part of the planet, it might see this beneficial tool as multi-faceted. It could choose to retain it as part of its defense repertoire…

Anyway, ‘global cooling’ is the solution to a poorly understood something called ‘global warming’. what we face is climate change.

Just as climate change is going to create different effects in different areas so any geo-engineering solution will too. Not all nations will be affected equally. Then the sulfur will hit the fan.

Probably a Faustian bargain in the works here (a la “Be careful what you wish for”). If anyone thinks they can control human nature they are, I believe, sorely mistaken. Oh, well…another good sci-fi movie in the making,,,

I’m sure others will do fine at arguing about the benefits and risks of geoengineering. I want to talk about this bizarre notion of what liberalism is.

If lefties have cars, huge suburban homes, and arguably the oil industry, the meat industry, and industrialization (as it is practiced) “in their sights”, it is because those are or are the products of wasteful and/or polluting behaviors. So it is that lefties don’t like them because they are harmful, not that lefties call them harmful because they don’t like them.

Since when is the left against rural areas? This is completely made up.

Insofar as liberals may criticize western nations, that is because western nations are generally large and have more disposable wealth with which to make significant changes. It would be a waste of time to criticize the Maldives for having too many charcoal fires, for example. And lefties are entirely ready to criticize China, Russia, India, and Japan for their environmental behaviors. Any seeming bias against western nations could be easily characterized as a confusion between rational criticism and moral criticism, and a statistical preference for talking to and about agencies closer to home rather than farther afield.

Stop trying to play red-state/blue-state and talk about the real issues and _real_ solutions – whether they are political (always a necessary component with problems of this scale), or technical. Cost & risk versus benefit & feasibility must be discussed -without that discussion it is all just smoke.

Its likely that this will ultimately happen in some form, but probably none of those mentioned. We’ve been lucky with the weather in our lifetimes. Its been about as good as it can be historically, no mini ice ages, pretty stable really. Historically , we could be wanting to warm things up a bit. We just don’t know and there’s where it really gets dangerous to start discussing these engineering ideas.

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The Thread is an in-depth look at how the major news events and controversies of the day are being viewed and debated across the online spectrum. Compiled by Peter Catapano, an editor in The Times’s Opinion section, the Thread is published every Saturday in response to breaking news.